The present invention relates to a recording/reproducing apparatus for writing and reading signals on and from a recording medium, and more particularly to an integrated thin film inductive write, magnetoresistive (MR) read head (which will hereinafter be referred to as an integrated head) used in connection with a so-called rotary cylinder comprising a plurality of disk-like recording media rotatably supported on a rotary spindle and to a track arrangement of the disk-like recording medium of the rotary cylinder.
Recently, improvement for signal recording and reproduction systems such as a so-called hard disk apparatus is being made for increasing recording density increasing and write/read efficiency promoting purposes, and an integrated head has been developed which comprises a thin film inductive element for a write mode and an MR element for a read mode and which is mounted on a head slider constructed to float on a so-called air bearing principle. For positioning such an integrated head to one of a plurality of rotary disks coaxially arranged to have a cylindrical configuration as a whole, there is generally being employed a swing type access mechanism comprising a swing arm which carries the head slider with the integrated head at its one end and rotates about the other end so that the integrated head moves to and separates from the rotary disk.
There are some problems which arise with such a recording/reproduction system, however, particularly when using small form factor disks whose diameters are 3.5 inches or less as recording media. A serious problem is an occurrence of a yaw angle (skew misalignment) which arises due to the movement of the integrated head to the disk in an are made in accordance with the movement of the swing type access mechanism. A large yaw angle reduces the effective track widths on the disk as well as decreasing the floating amount of the head slider. Accordingly, there is a limit to the yaw angle and the limit is desirable to be 15.degree. to 20.degree.. In addition, there is a separation (generally about 10 .mu.m) in position between the inductive write element and MR read element. Subject to a large yaw angle, the on-track positions of the inductive write element and the MR read element differ from each other between the write and read modes, creating an off-track state. This off-track increases reproduction errors and lowers the throughput. Further, the off-track causes a problem in sector identification and others. In this system the recording into a data field is required to be made immediately after the reading of identification data from an information identification field because the recording and reproduction are made with different heads. When an offset occurs between the magnetic center lines of the MR read element and inductive write element when the yaw angle is relatively large, difficulty is actually encountered to accurately recognize the sector number and others.
Elimination of such an off-track state has been attempted by minimizing the off-track amount at the outermost position of the disk where the yaw angle becomes the largest or reducing the separation between the inductive write element gap and the MR read element. However, in fact the offset amount of an information identification field from a data field becomes large in the case of merely minimizing the offset amount so that difficulty is made to recognize an identifier (identification information) to reproduce data, and further there is a limit to the reduction of the separation therebetween from the viewpoint of the recording characteristic of the inductive write element and the shield characteristic of the MR read element.